Once, when he had asked her what she thought of the chief’s health, she had given him a sad smile: “Krona is well. But let his new bride come soon.”
And indeed, Krona’s impatience became increasingly clear. When they discussed the future, his eyes were concerned and sometimes he would take the High Priest by the arm and say:
“Sacrifice another ram to the sun god, so that Omnic may return soon with my bride.”
Each time Dluc did as he asked, and always he reminded him:
“Do not despair. We are building the new temple. If we obey the gods, they will keep their promise.”
But Krona was still fearful.
“Tell the masons to work quickly,” he urged. “Time is passing and soon I shall be old.”
They were anxious years. To the High Priest they seemed to be long periods of darkness, pierced through occasionally with rays of hope: like the cloudy days interspersed with sunshine that were such a feature of the high ground in the spring and autumn of each year.
At the sarsens’ quarry the work continued all year round, only halting when the weather made it impossible to continue.
It was a strange place. It lay on an empty tract of downland, and, properly speaking, it was not a quarry at all. For the huge sarsen boulders from which the henge was to be made were not buried under the ground, but lay on the surface – hundreds of long, low humps of rock, rising only a few feet above the ground – so that from a distance it looked as if the landscape was covered by a flock of motionless, giant grey sheep.
Never had Nooma been busier: his squat form bustled everywhere in a heavy leather apron, his hair full of dust; but he had about him now an air of quiet authority and his word was never questioned as he showed the men how to cut and shape the huge rocks.
Discipline was strict. The men working at the quarry or felling trees on the ridges were kept in camps for months at a time. At the great festivals of the year, the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes, the priests ordered Tark to bring slave girls to the camp, and the best workers were rewarded with them for two days, after which their work began again. At such times, Tark had always seen to it that Nooma had the pick of them.
The workers on the henge who were not already married were forbidden by the priests to take a wife; but in the second year, as a reward for his services, Nooma was told that he might do so.
This posed the mason with a problem. “I have no time to look for a wife,” he muttered as he surveyed the busy scene around him. Yet the thought of it excited him. Accordingly, one spring morning, he walked down to the trading post to consult his friend Tark.
“I need a girl,” he said.
Tark grinned. It was known that his own sexual appetites were prodigious. He kept several slave girls besides his wife and he had more than once let Nooma know that, without the knowledge of his priests, he could procure him a slave girl whenever he wanted.
But when Nooma explained that it was a wife he required, the river-trader grew serious. He listened carefully to his friend and then replied:
“Come back in three days. I will make enquiries.”
He was as good as his word. When Nooma returned, he had already spoken with several families along the five rivers who had suitable daughters, and had found that all of them would be glad to give a girl to the skilful builder of the henge, who was in such favour with the priests.
Carefully he outlined the merits of each.
“But the best is Katesh, daughter of Pendak the potter, who lives along the western river,” he said. “Her father is anxious to please the priests: he would part with the girl for five pelts; and for a girl like that, the normal marriage price would be twenty.”
“Is she so good-looking?” the mason asked.
“A beauty. I’ve seen her,” the trader assured him. “Black eyes, soft hair, and her body . . .” he made a lewd sign and laughed. “I envy you.”
Two days later, when Nooma saw the girl, he had to agree with his friend’s description.
She was thirteen, and the first thing he noticed was her large, lustrous black eyes and pale, creamy skin. She was a little taller than the mason. Her black hair fell to her waist; and though she stood quietly when her father brought her forward from the little hut beside his pottery, there was something challenging about the way she held her shapely young body, that stirred the mason to immediate excitement.
While he spoke to her father he was aware that the girl was watching him, and though her eyes carefully never met his, he knew that every point about him had been carefully noted. He wondered whether what she saw had pleased her.
He made his decision on the spot.
“I will take her,” he told the potter, who was delighted by the match.
A few days later he and Tark came up the river to the potter’s house, the five pelts were paid, and the girl was his. Slowly they paddled back to the place where the five rivers met, while Tark gently hummed a tune to himself, and the mason grinned almost foolishly at his good fortune.
When Nooma had brought her to the small house he had prepared in the northern valley, and she had silently cooked the customary meal of wheat cakes and meat, he rose to his feet the moment the meal was eaten and raised her up in his strong little arms. While he watched with a gasp of delight, she took off the loose woollen robe that all the women wore, and he saw her fresh, sweet-smelling body and her firm young breasts. Only then did she raise her large eyes slowly to his, and he saw their cautious uncertainty, and also an unmistakeable challenge: he guessed that she was wondering if this small man would be able to satisfy her.
The months that followed were a time of new joy and excitement for the little mason, as he explored each night his wife’s young body. He would hurry back from the henge now before dusk fell, when he might have lingered before, so that it became a joke with all the masons as they saw his bandy-legged little form hurrying urgently towards his wife.
Fate had not been kind to Katesh. She was a lively, good-looking girl who could, in the normal course of events, have expected a rich choice of husbands from the farmers around. It was her bad luck that her father was so anxious to please the priests. When she heard that the mason had been asking for her she was dismayed,
“I have heard about him,” she cried. “They say he is small and ugly with a huge head.”
“He is the finest mason on the island,” her father told her, “and he is very popular with the priests.”
“But what if I do not like him?” she protested.
“You’ll be lucky if he’ll have you,” she was told.
When she first saw Nooma, her worst fears were confirmed. While the little mason saw that she was discreetly eyeing him, he little guessed the unhappy thoughts that were going through her mind.
“He is ugly,” she thought, “but I can bear that if I must. He is shorter than me. That’s not so terrible. But he is . . .” she did not want to think of it: “he is absurd,” she acknowledged. “How shall I love him?”
That night as she thought of the young man – undefined but handsome – that she had always dreamed would be her husband, and as she realised that the rest of her life might be spent with this worthy fellow with his big solemn head, his bandy legs and the funny little hands that she had observed that day, she wept bitter tears.
For two days, she pleaded with her father, but each time he turned his face away as though he could not hear her, and her mother only shook her head sadly.
“You must obey your father,” she told the girl. “He will choose the right husband for you.”
When the mason came for her and paid her father the absurdly low price that he had asked, she hid in the house and wept until her parents came in to fetch her. Then her mother firmly gave her the advice – it was really an order – that was to see her through the rest of her life:
“Remember Katesh, you are thirteen now – grown up. You must make your husband believe that you love him. And you must always obey him, that
is your duty. Make sure you do both these things or you will suffer.”
In the coming years, she did her best. But on that sunny day, as the boat carried her towards her new home, and she looked up at the towering ridges and the broad, sweeping spaces of Sarum under the clear blue sky, it seemed to the young girl that the rest of her life was ordained to be a long and terrible sacrifice.
She remembered her mother’s words.
Night after night, as the little mason made vigorous love to her, thinking that he impressed her with his strength and passion, she tried to pretend that she, too, was carried away; and since the mason was filled with pride and excitement, it did not occur to him that his young bride might not be delighted with his passionate attention, his endless thrusts and his grunts of pleasure.
Indeed, knowing the excitement she caused her little husband did give Katesh a momentary delight and satisfaction; but she was glad that on most days she was alone, and she did not look forward to the nights when he returned.
Several times the mason took her to see the henge, where already the sacred bluestones were being moved to one side to make way for the new sarsens. Each time she noticed the grins of amusement on the faces of the labourers, and sensed the lewd jokes they were making in whispers as the bandy-legged mason led her proudly along; each time she secretly cursed the gods for giving her a husband whom she could not love.
It was at this time that the mason made a remarkable discovery. In order to make sure that he had fully understood the priests’ designs, he had made for himself a little wooden model of the new henge. It was a fine piece of work, every measurement precisely to scale, and when the priests saw it, they nodded their approval: this was exactly the temple they wanted. But although the priests were satisfied, Nooma was not. Something about the model – he could not at first say what it was – displeased him; and for several days he studied it until he thought he understood the cause.
What he did next made Katesh wonder if he had lost his mind, and delighted the children from the neighbouring farms. Each night now, before retiring to bed, by the light of a taper, he would fashion curious little wooden arches, even tiny henges a few inches high, each one with a subtly different shape; then, at sunrise and sunset he would place these little structures on the turf and lie on the ground, watching them intently as the light caught them.
“Look, Nooma is playing his game again,” the children would cry. And they would fall on him, ruffle his hair and often knock over the tiny henges and arches until the place looked like a battleground.
“They aren’t even straight, your arches,” Katesh remarked.
But the little mason good-naturedly shook the children off, set up his models again, and resumed his intense observation.
When, after nearly a month of this strange behaviour, he was finally satisfied, Nooma gathered up the original model of the henge together with several of his curious arches, and took them to the priests.
“The new henge is badly designed,” he told them bluntly. “It won’t look right.” To their surprise he placed his models on the ground and explained “See how the light catches the uprights where they join the lintels. Although they are straight, they appear to get closer together towards the top. The building looks top-heavy.” Then he showed them the little arches he had made. “You see – I have tapered the uprights towards the top, and the effect is lighter. The columns seem to be straighter; even though they are not.” To strengthen his point, he showed them a drawing. “This is how it should be.”
And when the priests looked, it was undeniably so.
What Nooma had observed was the phenomenon, well known to the Greeks, of entasis – the bending of pillars; and to this day it can be seen that the upright sarsens of Stonehenge are tapered towards the top, a sophistication unknown in any other prehistoric building in northern Europe.
It was in the spring of the next year that Katesh told Nooma that she was pregnant. His face lit up with a grin.
“When will the baby come?” he asked eagerly.
“At the start of winter,” she said. “Around the feast of Winter Day, I think.” She was glad at least to make her little husband happy.
“It will be a boy,” he said. “A fine mason.”
And swelling with pride, the mason gave a sheep to the priests for sacrifice, to ensure the blessing of the gods on his first child.
In the following months, he went about his work with a light heart; in the evenings he would sit for hours contentedly in his hut and look with pride and admiration at the swelling body of his young wife.
As autumn came and winter approached, and Nooma became daily more excited by the obvious approach of his child, his spirit of optimism was in stark contrast to the prevailing mood at Sarum.
For no word had been heard from Omnic.
As the months passed, Krona asked, with growing insistence:
“Where is my bride?”
Though the High Priest constantly assured him: “The gods will provide her. Be patient,” he himself was beginning to be concerned.
“Perhaps Omnic has drowned. We should find another,” Krona suggested gloomily. And Dluc had to admit to himself that the chief might be right. The cloud of depression had returned to Sarum and seemed to be settling.
“If there is no sign of your bride by Winter Day,” he finally said, “then we will send out other priests. You shall have a wife before midwinter.”
In the late autumn, to keep his own spirits up and to encourage the workers on the henge, the High Priest decided himself to visit the sarsen site to inspect Nooma’s progress with the stones.
It was a windswept afternoon when he arrived. Grey shafts of sunlight burst through the fissures in the heavy grey clouds and lit the bare landscape harshly. The cold north-east wind that drove the clouds over the moorland threw the dust from the stonework into the masons’ and the priests’ eyes.
Nooma, in his heavy leather apron, his grizzled hair powdered with dust, prostrated himself in front of the High Priest and at his command quickly conducted him round the site.
It was extraordinary what he had done. Already three huge sarsens lay ready to be moved, and several others were nearing completion. As the party threaded their way through the knots of men they came upon a huge rock that was about to be worked into shape. It lay along the surface, seven feet across and as long as ten men.
Nooma patted it.
“I can make one of the tallest uprights from this one,” he said with confidence, and pointed to where a group of men were busily engaged near the centre of the rock. “This is where we cut it,” he explained, and he showed the High Priest a deep V-shaped groove that he had made across the stone. Underneath, at the same place, the men had dug a trench in the ground which they had just filled with brushwood.
The act of cutting through the rock was a remarkable operation, and Dluc remained to watch it. First the men lit the brushwood and then they busily stoked it, pushing fresh wood into the trench with long poles. Soon the heat had become tremendous and the rock grew so hot that no-one could touch it. Nooma urged the men on. After a while, the rock began to glow, but still the mason was not satisfied. Then finally, when the air around the rock seemed to pulsate with the heat, and the men’s faces were burning, he gave the order: “Now the water;” and quickly the men ran forward with leather buckets of water which they emptied into the V; there was an explosion of steam.
“More! more!” he called and they slopped the water in, jumping back so as not to be scalded. The process went on for several frantic moments, and then there was a great crack and all the men cheered.
As the steam cleared, it could be seen that a fissure had opened right through the red hot rock at the point where the split had been made. There was no sarsen, however large, that the mason could not reduce in this way.
Then Nooma led the party of priests over the rest of the site. The sarsens were in all stages of preparation and Nooma supervised everything. In particular, he watched over the
dressing of the stone, which his masons did by pounding them with hard, round stones, which removed a little of the surface at a time.
“You see,” he explained to them, “the men always strike downwards, from the top of the upright towards the bottom. That way, every stone will have a consistent surface.”
When the priest inspected a finished sarsen, he could see that it was covered with minute grooves all aligned in the same direction, giving it a single grain so that when the stones were all in position, the light would always strike a vertical edge, enhancing the graceful effect of the whole.
Truly, he could see, Nooma was a master of his craft.
It was just as the High Priest was admiring this work that a messenger came running over the downland towards them.
“High Priest,” he cried, “you must come at once to Sarum: Krona is sick.”
He was more than sick: he seemed to be dying. The High Priest learned that a fever had seized him the very day that he had left for the quarry, but the chief had ignored it. By the time the priests were called, it had grown rapidly worse and soon they had despaired of saving him.
When Dluc entered Krona’s house, he was lying on a bed of straw; there was a lull in the fever and he lay very still, shivering only occasionally. His flesh was grey; his eyes were glazed, but fixed on the roof above him, and he did not appear to notice the priest. Dluc had seen men like this before; but none who had lived.
On the floor at his side, like a shadow, sat the stately figure of Ina. She had grown old suddenly, as the island women often did: her body was bent, her hair, which was now white, had grown thin. She was very quiet and he could see that she had been weeping.